Tuesday, 15 March 2011

Infans Solaris Progress and The Studio's Origins

Time to write about some actual studio goings-on I guess.

Scitalis Games roughly started out in July 2010 by the banding of a few graduate game designers and programmers aiming to create and release games to be enjoyed by the gaming public. Initially starting on "Project: Other World", work was underway in creating an open-world 2D adventure, however this project clearly became a little too over-ambitious for a starting out studio and so ideas for an easier to develop and some-what more casual game began to arise whilst work on Other World continued.

After a few prototypes for other game concepts were built, an idea on an 'Asteroid'-based game stood out as the most likely game to be released as a debut title, this was Solaris (Later changed to 'Infans Solaris' [Latin: Sun Child] due to potential copyright issues). With a stable studio team established, work on both titles were carried out by different members of the studio team at the same time, with the coders working mostly on 'Infans Solaris' and the world environment and other aspects of 'Other World' being created by the artists, with both teams working opposite projects when needed.

With help from Venture Wales, the studio has also been confirmed for a number of grants from the Welsh Assembly Government provided the studio is based in Wales, with this Scitalis soon hope to move into an office space and have an official base from which the team can work from.

Work on Infans Solaris is currently close to completion and will hopefully be out around the start of April for xbox 360, PC and Windows 7 mobiles. The game will feature gravity based weaponry, allowing up 4 players to manipulate blackholes causing belts of asteroids to be pulled from their currently trajectory and forced to gather and be broken down at the heart of a blackhole. However, the more a blackhole breaks down the greater it's gravitational pull will be, possibly becoming great enough to drag players towards the hole itself. This is a good way to boost scores but can also potentially cause the player to take a great deal of damage if they're not careful. I.S. (Infans Solaris) will also feature a number of other weapons used to break down or manipulate asteroids in other ways in order for players to stay alive, protect the Earth in Defense mode or destroy other players within the game's Verses mode.